Bright Shadows
by 7.Saavikam
Summary: Shunned for acting Romulan on Vulcan, Maiek stows away to Earth to see his parents again, only to be captured by Romulans seeking another war. His life, love, and allegiances are all thrown out of balance as he struggles to escape and not become his fear
1. Welcome To Earth

**2306**

**Just after T'Sei's _fal tor pan_**

**Vulcan**

From the reddish cloud of dust that obscured everything still even after the ship touched down on Vulcan's surface, a man and two boys emerged like an afterthought. In the dust, their features were indistinct aside from pointed ears and dark hair. In all but expression, they were Vulcan, but the oldest boy looked ahead with something like rejection of this place clear on his features. Unnamed instinctual calculations told him he would survive here—he could find some way for Rhys to survive as well, if something happened to the man. But he didn't know enough; it was too difficult to see around him, and so he was wary, and held Rhys tighter. The toddler's face was buried in Maiek's shirt, revealing only curly hair and the tips of his ears. The first difference. Maiek's hair was straight and dark and nearly hid his eyes, for which he was sometimes grateful. But Rhys was obviously not of entirely Vulcan ancestry.

Ruanek had tried to speak a few words of Vulcan to them on the ship; he didn't know the hybrid language the boys had learned from their parents. Maiek had turned away. Not unkindly, but—his life had changed.

Maiek felt a brief loss for anything green, any other language, any other planet, then shoved it away.

Some of us are shadows, the boy thought. Some only live long enough to be shadows after they are forgotten. It was not himself he thought of, though his presence on Vulcan was a shadow of the war that had nearly happened and of a long, silent conflict inside Romulus.

_We can live here_, was all that mattered that he noticed. _We can live here, not be killed._

The door opening was a sudden change from the unbroken near-desert outside. Maiek blinked, looking up and tilting his head. He had not known what would happen further than that they were safe, but they would never return to Romulus. Not where they went, or who these people were.

Saavik had agreed, weeks earlier, to take in Tarek's children for a while, as long as necessary. Not because he was her half-brother, but because of the startling realization that these children were like herself when she had come to Vulcan—ripped away from everything they had known, still wary of the strange planet, and utterly foreign to the utterly foreign people who took them in.

She knew that situation so well it was like reading their thoughts as she looked into the older boy's eyes.

_Why are you so clean?_

_Why should I trust you?_

_How can I leave?_

He was so tense it seemed he would break or strike out, staring with that same confusion and determination she had seen in Spock's eyes a long time ago. For the slightest second, his powerful gaze held her in place, until she recognized Ruanek beside him. Looking back at the boy, she saw he was a little older than she had been, maybe thirteen, expression fierce and much older, his body sharp and skinny and in unfamiliar clothes she instantly recognized as Romulan.

Of course, he was much younger than any of the children from Hellguard—she and all those children had grown; Tarek and Rhian, his parents, had been on Hellguard. Saavik had a wild hope right at the beginning as she saw one of the first of the differences and knew he would change beyond the little they had been able to:

Difference. A small, curly-haired child the boy held. Not a younger one attacked or left behind, as the younger children had been on Hellguard, and not his own child—some had mated that young, problems springing from their pasts and the difficulty in caring for another…a difficulty Maiek would not have, hopefully.

The toddler raised his head and looked at Saavik, then upwards. Maiek said something fast in a language Saavik had tried hard to forget. Perhaps it was this, or Ruanek's reply in Romulan based on what little he had understood—or a sudden reason for trust; Maiek may have seen something of his father in Saavik's face—but the tense, guarded boy stepped inside finally after that significant exchange.

He took a cursory glance around and must have deemed the place safe. He sat on the floor beside a couch, despite Saavik's best efforts to make him move somewhere more comfortable, and eventually relinquished Rhys, who, younger, gave T'Sei a squinty smile before falling asleep, oddly reminiscent of T'Sei at that age. Spock was at his parents' house; they had both thought he, more Vulcan, would be trusted later.

It would be a while before he would be entirely open to her. But Saavik guessed that some internal honor would make him stay. And that, as they said, was that.

2308

ShiKahr, Vulcan

The sun had just disappeared over the horizon of the Forge like a warning. If Maiek closed his eyes, he saw a different sunset, a different darkness, the horizon of a different planet marred by a single unmarked grave.

Analek, his half-brother, had been the best of Rhian's children, the most forgiving. Before Maiek could understand most of the danger the survivors of Hellguard had been in, Analek had been a shadow a few years older keeping the other shadows at bay, a large part of his sanity. With Analek's sudden end, part of Maiek had been quietly extinguished. There was no seeing it from the outside; his face had been unmoved as a Vulcan's, the shock still not entirely gone. Spock and Saavik, in whose care Maiek and his four-year-old brother Rhys were for some indefinite time, were like distant, untouchable planets. He still flinched from them or fought them, eyes defiant, the energy within him that made him not Vulcan unextinguished, whether it was from his Romulan and half-Romulan parentage or his loss.

He was not forgiving. His half brother had been.

_Maiek looked up in an eight-year-old's shock after the hard impact on the ground. He hadn't considered his brother would disagree with anything he said. His fingers scrabbled in the dust, but at the look in Analek's eyes, the experienced crouch, did not right himself. _

_"Why?" he spat, seeing the streak of green that ran into Analek's short dark hair. _

_His older brother's face was serious and utterly…different than Maiek's had ever been. _

_"They don't belong here but we can't hurt them. Evine can take them to Vulcan."_

_Maiek shook his head, not looking at the two Vulcan children. "All right. Although I don't understand." It was his bruises, overall, talking. He had defended the children from the Romulans, but their logic...and what they said..._

_"You will someday."_

But Analek would have never thought of what Maiek was about to do. It wasn't a split-second decision, but a long plan. It had started a year ago, a year after he and Rhys had arrived on Vulcan. Rhys had ran out into the desert and asked unsuccessfully any Vulcan he saw if he could charter a spaceflight to Earth—they hadn't seen their parents since before they left. Maiek was too used to finding him for him to be lost for long. As he dragged the younger boy back to Spock and Saavik's house, he had said, "if you're going to run away, run away properly."

The plan had lifted Maiek out of the depths of his thoughts. He was having trouble adjusting to Vulcan. The language would not come easily to him, so he stubbornly kept using Romulan or that hybrid language of Romulan and Vulcan, when he spoke at all—mostly to Rhys. What little Vulcan he managed was oddly accented but clear, spoken to his instructors. He was in a class of much younger Vulcans, since he had difficulty with the language, which "was not going well," Spock had said after Maiek stumbled home grinning and bruised. Spock and Saavik would call him perfectly responsible, just…held back from everyone. Inwardly rebellious. It didn't entirely make sense to them, but while Spock struggled for answers, Saavik let the days pass without troubling Maiek too much. That suited him perfectly.

He would leave before the sun set, this day. Before sunset yesterday, he had crept into Rhys' room, seen his sleeping face, and known that Rhys would not come with him. Maiek knew survival, but cold fear still plated his bones: there was a chance he could die, in trying to reach his parents.

Though only two years had passed since they had arrived on Vulcan, Rhys looked older than he had been. He was four now, not two, some of the baby far gone from his cheeks, some more words added to his vocabulary, all fear gone from him—but he was still so young he most often had to be carried, and Maiek didn't want to fear for him while he found his mother and father. What he would do once he contacted them, he didn't know—but something in him knew he would have to see on his own whether they were alive, what they were doing, and that he was not complete on his own. He wanted Rhian to hold him in her arms if only for a moment, and all of the problems on Vulcan would vanish briefly.

There was so much they understood that Saavik and Spock couldn't possibly comprehend.

And Maiek didn't know himself like he had when he had been on Romulus. He had been sure of his own personality, his vitality—he could run across half of the plain in a single night, could try to ward away assassins, could warn the survivors of Hellguard if needed be. Now, not tethered to any place he belonged to, not kept from learning, not pushing his abilities in any way, he was…lost, changed. He realized he didn't know his thoughts like he should, and this worried him. And that perhaps there would be some danger in the future he couldn't run from, being lulled by the desert and the logic of Vulcan.

He felt a greater presence of thought than he usually did—felt everything more vividly, in this anticipation. He was barefoot, just a little far away from Spock and Saavik's house that just began to catch the sunrise that lit him like a warning he embraced. The sand beneath his feet was not a coalesced hard surface, but different grains, rocks, the pain of feeling them minute. He could only stay to see this place for a moment before he left. But even that was a freedom he felt keenly. Alone, he simply was. He did not answer to any questions, any understanding, any obligation to take care of or avoid anyone. His eyes met the blind disc of the sun and then he sprinted away, noting the direction he left the house from. It was the opposite direction of the wind: by nightfall or before, his tracks would be gone like memories. It was how he had avoided the same assassin who had killed Analek—

_A sudden dull thud in the night, strong as surprise, sudden as the stutter in Maiek's heartbeat. He turned around rapidly—there was no shadow across the horizon. Someone gasped, the voice distorted from anything Maiek recognized, but after a moment—eyes narrowed—he could make out the face he saw as his older brother's beneath the green blood that clotted onto the ground, saw Analek dying like a much younger boy, never saw the assassin leave to kill the men and women in the house. Analek's eyes burned across his vision. He remembered a Vulcan boy and girl suddenly, and turned and retched on the dry ground. He was directionless…lost…blindly he searched for Rhys, was only a shadow in the days to come._

He had been watching a Vulcan who came sometimes to the stall he worked at when he was not in school. Spock and Saavik didn't know of this—or perhaps they did and did nothing—Maiek earned a small amount of money in a job that required little speech, and any Vulcan glaring at him for being illogical earned a glare back or a back turned. This one had talked to Maiek, having some weird Vulcan equivalent of sympathy, about starships of all things. Maiek feigned uninterest but asked the man if he had any ships of his own. He did, it turned out. That was not how Maiek would be going to Earth, however. Rhys had made a similar mistake to the one Maiek avoided.

There. He had reached the organized huddle of cargo ships beyond the passenger ones. If he was careful to step aside so he would not be scattered into random molecules by the cleaners, he could leap aboard—this one that would leave in a few hours. It was bulky, and he would be unnoticed. He grinned, tensed his muscles, and leapt. A hard impact told him he was alive. Gratefully he let the air whoosh out from his lungs and hid underneath the cover of a cargo container, chipping away at the material until he could fit inside.

Whatever it was was hollow, he discovered as they moved. He rattled around in it like a bean. It was an interesting shell, however, nearly luminescent, a translucent orange. His dreams—he dreamed briefly—were less weighted than the ones that had come to him nights before, of Analek dying; he thought instead of his father, Tarek. Tarek had told Maiek when he was not much older than Rhys that he had lived on Romulus for a year or two in his life before Hellguard, and the few memories he had had were happy.

_That's right_, Maiek thought.

_Whether you find them or not, you're free. You'll be happy._

He sincerely hoped so. He knew he would return, but the night before, he had been nearly paralyzed with worry, thinking of Rhys. He had to assure himself Rhys would be taken care of properly by Spock and Saavik, so that he wouldn't impulsively snatch his younger brother away, damn everything.

The rumble of takeoff beneath him faded into the silence of space. Maiek let his worries go.

_Earth will be completely different than Romulus. Different than Vulcan. Different from what little I know. _

He had not been the sort of child to wonder if there was another family somewhere like his, someone like himself only a little different, with the same lives, the same thoughts, just on different planet. He just thought vaguely, _different._

He had not thought of how it would be different, just that it would.

He blinked, hearing voices—

Voices.

Maiek grew rigid inside his container, heart hammering as the world skewed sideways. Someone carried it…somewhere. He crouched, tense, for what must have been hours, not daring to move. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead and fell to the bottom of the translucent orange shell-like tube. His foot tapped—he stilled it. His breaths grew shallow. He moved his shoulder, hazarded a glance up, saw only a vast unbroken sky of orange translucent blurriness.

_Oh. Right._

He hooked his thumb over the edge of what must have been the top of the container, frowned and swore in a low voice as it didn't come free. The edge bit his finger. He hissed and pushed harder, completely taken by surprise at the lack of resistance as it broke and he tumbled onto the ground in the bright Earth light.

And thus he didn't roll, like he would have if he had fallen when fighting. He felt sore already, looked at the ground. It was silent—they must be gone. He picked himself up slowly. The containers were stacked at the side of some great compound beside a larger building. Everything was metal and looked…strange. Square. The air smelled different, the ozone burning his nose.

"Welcome to Earth," he said in Romulan to himself, a figure against the daylight, flattening himself against the building until he was gone from it.

Earth was strange, what little he saw of it then. Everything was moving, metal, chaos. What wasn't moving or metal was very old—or people. People so confusing and chaotic themselves he couldn't take them in, and let his guard down. He would have to hide in the open. In any case, he didn't know where to go. A sharp, full odor swept through the air and he followed it, finding he stood outside the entrance to a restaurant with unfamiliar writing emblazoned in bright colors over the doorway. He tried to translate into Romulan, couldn't, realized he had no money and that perhaps this was a miserable idea. He walked on, dreaming of food. Somehow he avoided being killed in the traffic. Children with rounded ears stared at him strangely from a strange angle, overhead, zooming away on something levitating. Older men and women and some he couldn't distinguish looked right past him, assuming he belonged here.

He thought he couldn't walk anymore. It was past the length of a day's run he had walked, people staring and not staring. He didn't know his way back. The air was heavy, the sun the wrong color, all of this in the back of his mind like a fever. He found himself underneath an unobtrusive sign, just when he thought he would drop from exhaustion, and nearly called out in the hybrid language as a response, recognizing the lettering above him as either Romulan or Vulcan. Vulcan, most likely. Relief poured through him. He began to step near the gates of this building—some Federation one, but he knew it must be the right one—when something yanked his arms back sharply. He tried to swing around but couldn't break free to scratch whoever it was, and found him staring angrily into the eyes of a Vulcan. Or a Romulan. Someone impassive, murderous. His fighting would do nothing, he knew, and he was in the shadows.

"You're not going in there," the Vulcan/Romulan said in a frustratingly androgynous voice.

"Just on time," they continued. Maiek fumed inwardly, but hung his head. He would die, and what would happen to Rhys…out of the corner of his eye, he looked up, just as his captor laughed, the edge of their face becoming visible in the shadows. It was marred by multiple scars that rippled in the half-light like something Maiek would rather not remember. The sight fell into the back of his retinas and stayed there. The high-pitched sound gave him time enough to think.

His captor was female, he had been able to identify from that sound, and terrifying. He wasn't as afraid as he seemed, however. Her voice was entirely unfamiliar. He hoped to catch some form of accent or other to identify where she was from, but it was carefully masked in what little he had heard. And she had no weapon. She would likely not kill him.

He realized her hand had been held away from his mouth for quite a while but was dangerously close to a nerve on his neck that could kill him. He thought. He could likely speak, quietly.

"You have no weapon. Your disruptor holster is empty, and you have no knife or poison. You're not going to kill me now. Why?"

She laughed the fearsome laugh again. If he wasn't already captive, he would have frozen.

"Why would I answer that?

"You are going to do something very important for me," was all she said, as she led him with the force of fear through some impossible to trace network of small roads or tunnels into the darkness.


	2. Against Her Wishes

The third day since he had been captured, and the woman had not given Maiek her name. She had a sharp but unnoticeable face, transformable, but for the scars all across the left side. _Veruul_, he decided her name would be with an inward satisfaction, for she offered none. He did not tell her his, either; she likely knew it.

He paid little attention to his room but for the fact that there was no way out. It was comfortable enough, oddly open. Veruul had explained, in her low sharp voice, that there were many ways he could be killed even if he escaped, but that it would surely not come to that. He stared out the window so many times he even saw a small drain that looked likely. Hacking into it with the knife under his sleeve—she had not searched him—revealed only a dried-up pipe too clogged to chip away at. He tried anyway, hiding small shards of wood and filth in the waste system, then, as the long shadows made it impossible to see, told himself he stayed out of curiosity.

And escape.

And survival.

Veruul came into his room as he blinked awake. He had slept in his sweater and by-now-dirty pants he had worn for days. He could feel the ache of a bruise across his cheek like an ever-present hand.

He woke, actually, at the sharp impact of a needle in his cheek. It whooshed strangely. The invisible hand released him. He wasn't surprised to see Veruul's dark eyes, and felt a vague disgust without much energy. She wasn't anywhere near him, a few feet away.

"Reflexes excellent," she commented in that voice as his hands shot sharply out to catch the clothes she threw at him suddenly.

"You're going outside today."

She didn't point him in the direction of where to go in the bathroom to clean himself. He puzzled out the workings of the 'fresher for a few minutes, then stepped out of his clothes and eventually changed into the new ones. He felt bleak, restless, nameless, defiant. He couldn't remember much about the day before or the day before that, only coming to Earth. The days were frighteningly blank, but he knew they had been days, knew the transitions but no details. He didn't remember eating, and didn't think he would—he didn't trust whatever food Veruul would feed him. He didn't think she would let him go if he nearly died, and would probably stop his starvation somehow. Whatever.

He only moved when she made him, but when he saw the blue sky overhead and could breathe the air, he took an involuntary step forward, false freedom rushing through his lungs like he could run. Sensing her satisfaction, he grew dull and uninteresting again, thinking inwardly of ways of escape, calculating any telling details in her demeanor or voice. He still found none. She was a black shadow, and paleness marred by asymmetry, the scar—otherwise utterly slipping past his notice.

"Go," she said. He tilted his head, spat a string of half-Romulan words just below her earshot. She gave no reaction, but her half-smile and sense of satisfaction grew.

"Go." Her voice was like a knife now. He cared not. She pushed at him until he nearly fell. He snarled, reverting to the fighting child he had been before Vulcan, and without thought, ran. Ran to the edge of a street, could nearly not find his way back. He looked up at the bright lights of the city, feeling hopeless. There were smells everywhere again, different than those on Vulcan. He was hungry. Before he knew it, he ducked out an alley, a dark blur much like Veruul had been, and snatched something so fast it was barely seen, the sustenance gone in a moment. Grease and satisfaction settled at the bottom of his stomach. His heartbeat pounded in his head, oceanic, muting the sting of his scalded tongue.

Veruul was suddenly beside him. He flinched. "Good," she whispered. "You'll go outside tomorrow."

Mentally, his mind somewhere between the drain and the open broken pieces of sky he could see through the window, he composed something the opposite of a love letter for Veruul.

It was full of profanity and means of death. His Vulcan tutors would think it illogical, though likely they did not understand his language, as much as he struggled with theirs. Maiek thought on that for a moment, comforted, then thought of Analek and was sickened by his own reaction to danger. He didn't face it, escape from it, just created more harm to others…

He was glad to be forgotten the next day, left alone in the darkness, arms around his knees, the absence of everyone he knew aching through him.

His knife was gone. She had taken it.

That night, it rained. He dreamed of Romulus. He ran through streets with a strange fear. Everywhere he turned, at the end of the street, his mother was dressed in black, warning him of something. He came to a river. At the other side, Rhys pointed to something. The ground beneath him grew unsteady, blurring into a haze of green air, and he fell off the earth. He was both afraid and comforted. He awoke with his heart pounding. He reached for something, but he didn't know what it was.

Some other Vulcanoid came with something like water, but Maiek refused it. It sat by his door, catching drops of rain slanting in from the window. He composed water stories, and true memories he could tell to Rhys. The few happy ones he could remember. They were mostly from when he was very young, and Tarek still stuck around the house. For most of Maiek's childhood, his father had been somewhere far away, worried, practicing medicine, fearing being caught, fearing being killed like the rest who had been on Hellguard, fearing for others more than himself. Maiek loved him strongly, however, with the kind of bond that comes from the only security through a lifetime of danger. With that thought, he missed Rhys, and was fiercely glad the four-year-old had not come with him.

Light and darkness blurred together into a mask of heat behind his eyelids, cracking his throat and his lips. His hands moved but he didn't understand. He walked into the door multiple times, sometimes slamming into the darkness of night. Someone opened the window. He stared at it balefully when his sight became clear, too weak and shaken to vault out of it and sprint away. He practically felt someone opening the door, and through his vertigo and nausea, sprang forward and took the glass from Veruul's hands, sucking it into his throat like it was life and he was full of death. He gasped, clenched his fist, saw shards edged with green, and fell into blackness again. He hated Veruul minutely less as she poured water over his hand, tipped his head back and poured more down his throat, not leaving until the next afternoon.

Weakness still edged his every movement as she led him outside again, not speaking. He blinked into the light. Walking was not an effort, but…he could not run away. A man…either Vulcan or Romulan, he still couldn't tell…had put clear film over Maiek's irises and something over his ears, changing their shape slightly. He wore something less dark than he had been given by Veruul before.

He was silent, outward rebellion gone in exhaustion; he wasn't entirely sure of his footsteps. He looked at the sky but didn't move. Veruul did not seem pleased; her mood cut like glass. He cared not.

She let him rest, or made him wait. She did not remind him of ways he could be killed. He did not need that.

"You're to go to this place—" she showed him a confusing network of lines Maiek blinked at, then, exasperated, brought one of the men and shoved his hand against Maiek's face. Maiek flinched at the image ripping through his mind, yelled, tried to bite Veruul. He knew the place though; the directions rested in his mind, the impression of food and people and bright lights shading his vision.

"Go there." He was given no further instruction.

The streets gave no instruction as he stumbled forward. He grinned, though, smiling for the first time since his arrival on Earth: maybe he could outrun Veruul and her minions. He could make a fool of himself and obviously speak nothing but Romulan—he knew only a little Standard—and reveal her to whatever authorities there were on Earth. He could cause enough of a scene they would lock him up, and then he could lead them to her, and finally get to his parents.

He ran, with lighter spirit and the exhilaration of an escape plan, to the place his mind directed him to. It was an interesting sensation, having images push him right or left or straight, letting his judgment tell him where on the sidewalk he should run, or whether to appear in a hurry. He stopped, seeing that sign blazing ahead of him, and pushed his collar tighter around his neck, suddenly cold. It was thick fabric but unusual, blue and rough. He wasn't sure he liked it, although mainly he didn't care.

There was no food inside, mercifully; Maiek would have taken it somehow if there was. He was starving, after dehydration or whatever that had been. There were drinks, everywhere, some looking suspiciously like Romulan ale. He walked towards a blue glass, curiously, forgetting it was someone else's—he had never had Romulan ale; Analek had pushed him away from it forcefully—

A voice in his ear—he jumped, saw no-one noticed even in this crowd inside—it was Veruul's—instructed him patiently to get a drink, let him figure out the Standard on his own. He glared minutely; Veruul must know he knew no Standard for it to be of use. He said something scathing in Romulan, forgetting she wasn't there, and reeled backwards as something knocked hard against his jaw. Then Maiek understood exactly the opposite of what Veruul wished and grinned wickedly, propelling his arm backwards and relinquishing himself to the sweet revenge of unconsciousness as someone returned his punch again. Just before everything receded, in the blurring of faces, he saw something odd, someone trying insistently to catch his notice. He turned his head but couldn't see…anything…couldn't…anything.


	3. Love

Water—or blood—dripped down his neck, but that was not the first thing that ebbed into his consciousness. With the sharp, sudden pain, his eyes flew open and he yelled. Someone restrained him with the same hand that had broken his arm. He found he was looking murderously up into Veruul's eyes.

"Don't do that again." Her voice was inflectionless as a Vulcan's.

She broke his arm in multiple places, and he gritted his teeth until she summoned another Vulcanoid to fix the breaks slowly. Looking down and away from the ropes of blood, he saw his face looking up from the ground: a reflection. His hair was…shorter, uniformly so, nearly spiky in its shortness, revealing eyebrows no longer slanted, and there was something wrong with his ears.

"You act too illogical to pass as Vulcan. We explained enough to the bartender and the people for them to forget this. You are _not_ messing up again."

He satisfied himself with another glare. Perhaps he could get lost in a large enough crowd, be unrecognized by his supposed humanness—but no:

Her hand bumped hard against his mouth and shoved something into it he was forced to swallow. Through the coughing, he heard her disjointedly. "You'll need to take one of these every six hours. They won't take effect for several days. Don't get cut; your blood will still appear as green."

She swung his chair around to look at his face, and tilted her head to the side. "Choose whatever name you feel is necessary. Now, here is your assignment."

His newly cut hair prickling against his neck, he walked down the alleyway, knowing he was not being followed. The chaos of the streets settled into a dull roar he did not notice anymore over his footsteps. He was less uneasy when noticed, walking and investigating as if trying out a second skin. He came to the same bar and grinned, seeing no recognition on the faces of the people inside, and easily gained a position there of minor work. The people glanced away from him, he saw, when he was not trying to be noticeable. They seemed slightly more comfortable with silence than Romulan curses. As he cleaned the counters, he imagined he was wiping the expressions off of Veruul's face. He returned later than he had been instructed to, with conversation he would not share, thinking of his family. And that with his newly found occupation, Veruul and could not follow him everywhere—and he was that much closer to freedom.

He escaped notice, in returning. Feeling oddly productive still—the energy of the city pulsed through him in jagged edges of light, and he could not sleep—he searched the far corners of the tiny room he occupied for bugs. He ineffectively swung his fist over the single one he saw that he then decided was a hairline crack in the wall and nothing more, singing Romulan battle songs at the top of his lungs and replacing the enemy names with Veruul's and her various ill actions towards him. Just before he closed his eyes, exhausted suddenly, he heard uproarious laughter muffled and echoing from somewhere beyond his cell. Someone here was Romulan, he noted, and sympathetic to his position.

Heartened by this, he let himself fall from consciousness into an open unguarded sleep, something he had not done for a long while. Only sharp after-edges of pain lancing through his arm tied him to the waking world, and even these threads grew faint and formless in the sea of darkness. In sleep, he was not running, but tried to form a plan of escape, another one—but it unraveled before his eyes and he saw only a face trying to catch his attention. He awoke frustrated the next morning with the edge of memory far beyond his reach.

Some mysterious benefactor had slipped his knife back under his door.

He tried harder to ignore Veruul's instructions though diligently listening to everything the bartender and the people at the bar said. He wasn't sure why he was supposed to do this, but it wasn't a misfortune to him—the bartender, a large man named Steve, grew to trust him though kept berating 'Michael' to 'go back to school and stop living on the streets', seeing the black eye Maiek had gained from the fight days previous. It was relieving not to have to watch his back around the people there, though he flinched whenever anyone approached him, half-expecting it would be a Vulcan/Romulan with a weapon. The days grew into a warm blur. He saved his focus for the nights, when he stood on tiptoe carving away the cracked up wall built up inside the pipe he could maybe someday escape through, the flash of the knife's edge repetitively bringing him to other memories. He had covered what might have been a bug and tensed up at any sound or shift in the long shadows, expecting Veruul or some other to suddenly walk through the door, but the night was empty of anything but the wind and the rattle of leaves against his window. After hours grew together, the knife slipped in his grip and he fell to the floor, shaking slightly from exertion. He looked up at the moon and then closed his eyes gratefully.

No-one had checked on him. There had been no contact with the Vulcan/Romulans since his arm had been broken, in fact, no food—he drank the water, having learned his lesson, but ate astonishing amounts of snacks at the bar in the daytime when the bartender wasn't looking. Perhaps Veruul trusted him. It was an odd thought. But then, why had she mentioned that if he left, he would die?

The next day, he was more exhausted than the night previous, something he hadn't thought possible. He nearly lapsed into second-long moments of unconsciousness, placing drinks on tables or wiping the floor. Luckily, no-one noticed. He was grateful that his hair no longer fell in his eyes; he didn't have the strength to brush it away. It was crowded today; voices shook and vibrated through his head with the music and the smells and the presences until he thought he would be sick.

No, it wasn't that. It was Veruul's fault.

The ground was diagonal now, nearly rushing up to him, not straight. Maiek stared at it, perplexed, the broom in his hand forgotten. Steve must have noticed something: Maiek stared at him, gasping for air, and rushed out the back door, clinging to it and closing his eyes, letting the world still. The outlines of things were treacherous, containers that could be gone at any moment as the earth moved. He coughed, once, then removed his shaking arms from the doorframe.

"Fvadt," he swore brokenly, looking downwards. He had managed to sit on the edge of a dumpster, motionless, only his voice revealing the turmoil in his mind. He glanced quickly at the doorframe—high above a normal person's grip, it had buckled, where it had been straight before. Slowly he rested his head in his hands then looked up again, staring forward.

Veruul had masked the directions as a diplomatic mission, as a minor theft or change in policies. Lying awake the night before, unable to grip the knife anymore to carve away at the clogged pipe, he had realized in successive shocks what she really asked.

He hoped it would not come to killing. He could kill, but he would not kill who she expected. No, if she had wanted deaths, she would have dealt with it by means of an assassin. There had been assassins before; there had been a time when Maiek was used to them hunting the people around him.

He went back inside once the ground had settled more. He refused to look into Steve's eyes with any kind of expression because surely, he would guess something. Terrible things he had to do.

He moved woodenly around the tables, picking up coasters and napkins and various odds and ends, not thinking of his motions. His mind had been trained so that he snapped to attention, despite the hate of it, at the words he heard.

He couldn't see the speakers. The bar was still relatively crowded, had been turned practically into a restaurant spilling into the street outside but still had little room.

"new policy forming—"

"—trying to—"

"—treaty—"

"—but no, it wasn't—"

"Romulus and the Federation—"

"Bastards, they—"

"have to admire someone who—"

He whirled around in shock, managing to keep his grip on the glasses he held. All the while, excitement raced through him. Perhaps he could outwit Veruul. Perhaps he could live without guilt. But the speakers had moved onto another topic, voices indistinguishable in the dull roar of other voices. Disappointment crossed his face. Someone clapped him on the shoulder, someone bumped into him, someone yelled or asked for more food. In a moment like air to breathe, he looked upwards and in the crowd of faces, there was a single face, a single voice. The exhilaration that came with the possibility that he might come out of this alive flowed suddenly, breathtakingly into other thoughts entirely.

"—that boy, whatever—" someone beside her was saying, their face a comparative blur. Maiek felt he couldn't breathe, every second encompassing a heartbeat.

"—not your fault," _she_ told someone else at the end of a long, incomprehensible sentence in Standard beyond any he knew. He wasn't moving. His body was, dodging people's paths to the bathroom or other tables, ducking to wipe up something spilled, but he wasn't. His throat constricted, heat rushing to his face—in cold fear, he realized he must be blushing green—fear that turned to sharp relief as he remembered the iron-based pills he had been given would be working now, and he appeared human.

The lights in the bar hadn't been made well, made everyone's skin appear strange ghastly colors of blue or yellow or green. Somehow she was only white light like the moon, untouched by the other lights. She had dark, reddish, long hair and a single earring on her right ear. She looked unlike any human he had ever seen.

He couldn't concentrate on anything. His body could, but his mind wandered free, away towards the sky, away from Earth. He saw her reflection in every glass like moonglow, saw when she turned and when she moved her long hands, saw the redness at the corners of her eyes. He was silent all throughout the night, when night fell. Steven the bartender didn't try to pull him away from staring, knew he could not take 'Michael' back from the place he had gone.

In the nighttime, he lay down, noticed from some pleasant far place the progress he had made in unclogging the pipework, his futile means of escape, and looked at the light of the moon across his knife until it flashed forgiveness into his eyes. Long into the night, the trees and the moon heard Rihannsu love songs.


	4. May

"Hey, you."

It was some weeks later. Maiek was sitting, alone, at an empty table, pondering life and death and the impossible mission he had been given. And escape. Silence had settled throughout the bar except for the sound of footsteps from the occasional passerby. Steve was silent, as well, not questioning Maiek's presence here as opposed to school or life. He hadn't for a week or so.

Maiek looked up in a strangled rush of heartbeat, breathing, and eye contact, seeing dark eyes and red-dark hair and that face. He tried to rise and sit at once and was resultingly motionless, which belied his struggles.

"Me?" His Standard had improved only slightly. He still had a bit of an accent, not really identifiable as Romulan, but…different.

He found it impossible to look away from her eyes, the way her hair was pushed back, her collarbone just above her shirt.

"What do you do here?"

"Work," he managed to say. To him, it sounded like gasping.

She smiled. "What's your name?"

"Maiek," he said unthinkingly, then flinched momentarily, taken aback at his own trust.

She repeated it, pronounced it more like 'Mike' but closer to its true pronunciation than gave him comfort. It was intoxicating and dangerous, from her.

"I'm May," she smiled. One hand moved forward, took her glass from him and shocked against his for a moment. He couldn't speak, was instead caught in her eyes. If she had asked him to speak further, he wouldn't have been able to.

"Over the moon in love," Steven laughed later on when Maiek, still tongue-tied, stepped outside to breathe properly.

Veruul, it seemed, was finding it increasingly difficult to talk to him. Her words were a low dangerous hum like artillery fired in the distance. Maiek clung to his thoughts and ignored her and once more looked calculatingly at the drainpipe and saw how far his arms would stretch to vault him out the window. He could escape easily enough, if he tried to. But he would be killed in some other way if he did, he knew. There was no escape but outwitting Veruul. And so he took his time with finding her information, and she shattered glass and bent wood in frustration, but he only smiled.

"Why are you here?" he asked May. A car passed in the distance. It was silent besides them.

"My parents don't care what I do. I do what I need to and no more. Sometimes I study, sometimes I learn in other places. They're not always there. You know the type—kind of like those people in history, the 'hippies'—they say they're changing the world but really they're abandoning me. But I grow from it."

May saw how he looked sadly at a small child walking in the street. Perhaps wondering if he had children—he was young, but—

He shook his head at her question. "No, it isn't strange to ask. My brother. I left him. I haven't seen him for weeks, maybe months. But if he had stayed with me, he may have died." For some reason, his eye had released a single tear that he hid from her in the light and darkness around them.

She flinched when unthinkingly, he stole food once from outside, but seemed to wonder why. He offered no explanation. Something about him was beyond her knowledge. He seemed older than he was, and yet younger, torn by some problem he didn't or couldn't speak of. He was a mystery, but her heart went out to him. She found she thought nothing of anything bad he did, didn't wonder at a bruise near his eye—it was strange, but despite the fierceness at the edges of his features, he was the most 'good' of anyone she had met. He seemed to regret anything he did that he shouldn't have done. There was a restlessness, a fear about him, that gave her fear too for him sometimes, and she would lie awake sometimes wondering why.

There were jagged, unhealed edges in his eyes, in his expression, one day. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes a moment, then said something she didn't remember—the tone itself caught at her mind. Something wrong had happened, or would happen. Something was troubling him. He nearly jumped at any loud sound. At the end of the day, she expected him to walk away into the darkness, but he looked at her instead and took her hand. It seemed oddly significant in some way she didn't quite understand, but that significance melted away; she brushed his lengthening hair away from his eye that had had the bruise, leaned forward and kissed him. She couldn't be sure, but she thought he had been crying. He was silent, but his eyes held words, pain, happiness.

Veruul had grown to mean 'hate' to him. Or 'run', or 'fear', or words more often unspoken. He nearly hit her one day, after she explained what he already knew—that he would have to use the information she knew he had, leave, and stop or assassinate his own parents, ending the agreement they worked for between the Federation and both Empires. He felt his life spiraling away out of his control. He talked briefly to the man he suspected had given him back his knife, but gained no hope from it. He hid kernels of secrets deep within himself but feared Veruul would find them out in some way, rip them from his mind with her darkness.

He stood, able to run, able to leave, but full of jagged fear, wondering what Veruul wanted. The wind spoke; she was silent. She led him to concrete and trees, covered his eyes as she guided him upwards in some building or other. "This is your new home. We won't be there."

"Shit by any other name is still shit."

_Captivity by any other name is still a cage._

He wasn't free. He knew it. She didn't glare at him or notice his clenched fists, or the underlying weakness. Exhaustion was getting to him, though he grew bold.

She didn't remind him of ways he could be killed, but mockingly leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

He was uneasy in this new place, even after she left. Convinced there were new eyes in this place, new bugs and reasons for fear. And now he had no true means of escape. He didn't sleep, was fine when he was at the bar the next day but silent. His eyes were heavy as his heart. His mind was shot with fear: Veruul trusted him, or this heralded a change in plans. The final plan taking place. May was gone from the bar that day. He dropped into sleep after a long day of cleaning and assisting at bartending, his head against one of the tables. At Steve's voice, as Maiek woke, he screamed. Steve's look was concerned but he didn't ask.

"If you need anything, kid, just tell me."

_Right._ Maiek knew there was no way Steve could understand what he was going through. To hide the anguish in his eyes, he asked if he could go outside briefly, to which the response was to take the day off if he needed to. Maiek swallowed and left.

He lay down on the cold concrete lot outside, at the backside of the bar. The leaves above him were striated with gold and red, not blood-green, which he was thankful for: he wasn't sure he could look at anything green without nausea, thinking of death. All his longing and sadness dissipated into the air, a connection between ground and sky.

May was waiting for him at the end of the day, outside the front of the bar. He felt his heart lift, though a corner was still rent from Veruul's orders. In the gathering shadows in the autumn sunset, she brought her hand to the side of his face, obviously not knowing that could have different meanings on Vulcan or Romulus. Her thoughts were almost tangible amidst the chill air, her eyes reflecting the leaves and seeming to ask something before she took his hand and they walked to his home.

There were no bugs there to see them; he had checked days before, for which he was suddenly relieved. Everything had grown very close in the dark; he had to fumble for breathing space as he opened the door, crowded by May, her smell, her voice, her smile, the reflection of her in his mind. The shadows and light merged with their heartbeats, their breath. He saw only the confused tilt of his head, her bare collarbone and half-smile, the light in her eyes, before she turned off the lights. He did not notice: they were lit from inside, standing with slow breaths audible, foreheads pressed together, eyes close to eyes, hands forming some infinite reflection of everything they couldn't say. Her fingers trailing the tips of his ears—_strange, seeming human_—his ricocheting off her single earring with a faint ringing noise—and downwards until there eventually was no separation between their skin but their difference, apartness. The air and their thoughts created a warm space between them that eventually closed. He forgot about the shadows in the room, forgot about Veruul and sadness, anger replaced wondrously, inexplicably, with connection. He forgot even that he was on Earth, lulled by her heartbeat and his incomprehensible tears that flowed over his skin as well. His sight grew dim and darker, consciousness going fuzzy.

"Jol-ao au," he said softly just before sleep, forgetting himself.

It didn't matter, he decided. Sometime, she would find out. Once he escaped.


	5. Love and Lies

He took Steve's near-order about taking the day off to mean the next afternoon, as well. For most of the morning, he lay awake without the constraints of worry, letting his thoughts drift in and out with the light filtering in through the window. May's brows were drawn together, in sleep, though worry had been wiped away from every other feature. He realized she likely worried about him, and blinked at the strangeness of that concept.

Her eyes opened slowly and smiled on their own. "Are you awake?" she asked quietly, still half-asleep herself, and moved so that she lay next to him.

"I have to do something," he said slowly. "I'll see you later." He held her gaze for a long moment, felt the inertia of his body—he didn't want to leave—but pulled himself away and threw his sweater over his bare chest and put on underwear and pants.

It was colder outside. Cold like a biting wind but for the small fire inside him. He had begun to hope, irrationally, that he might find some means of escape. It was a desperate hope that ate away at him with jagged edges, but it battled away any sadness or frustration. He walked aimlessly for a while, letting his thoughts wander. He was not prepared for the sharp impact and sudden, total darkness.

.

"Give me one reason not to kill you." His hate had no boundaries by now, nothing controlling what was reserved for Veruul. He looked upwards, darkly and totally angered, ignoring his sore neck muscles. He ached all over from whatever had she had given him that made him lose consciousness so quickly, and yet he nearly shook with his emotion.

"Ha!" Veruul laughed, looking at him coolly. When he was not so consumed with thoughts of how he would kill her as he was now, he was surprised she tolerated so much from him, and then afraid of what she would make him do.

"You're not going back." She looked away from him, making the edge of his anger grow further out of control. Her small fingers flipped his knife over and over, the reflection stabbing mercilessly at his eyes. Just as suddenly as she had taken it, she handed it to him, handle side out. "Take it," she said flippantly.

He couldn't breathe. "No," he managed, backing away as far as his sitting position would allow.

After a long day with nothing to mark the hours but the slow passage of shadows across the walls, a Vulcan/Romulan man came in and opened the door. Maiek winced at the burning in his feet as they made contact with the ground. There was a strange tingling feeling in his shoulders, faintly unpleasant, that traveled to his back and without warning, exploded into fistlike knots of tension and full-blown agony. He gasped.

"It feels like I've been tortured."

The man looked at him but didn't say anything. He bent his arm in an odd way, however, until Maiek mimicked him and realized it hurt less this way.

"Thanks."

Ignoring the pain, he ran with no sense of running but the dogged sense of being watched, chased. Steve had a question written across his expression, but the colors and images were slipping away from Maiek's understanding. He looked up at him but couldn't speak, dragged himself to a table and slumped down as if dead, feeling a strange sharpness in his hand before feeling nothing at all.

.

He wasn't at the bar, he realized when he woke. It looked too warm, too bright. There was an absence of sound that never happened at the bar.

"You were gone for days," May told him. Her face swam into view but grew sharper into focus. She looked haggard, her clothes as if she had thrown them on. Her hair was still sticking up in odd directions. There was an uncomfortable pressure at his arm. He winced and looked downwards. Horror icily stole his breath. Her hand held a cloth to his arm and the bottom of his hand, a cloth that was slowly turning green.

_Green—!_

"Three days, to be exact," she said, then seeing what he looked at.

"Uh-huh," she commented. The realization of her voice came to him then: it wasn't how he remembered—any concern was masked with cold anger. Or shock.

Before he could speak, she added in the same voice, "I'm not in school but I know enough about other planets to know that _you lied to me._ You're Vulcan. Or Romulan.

"Are you going to die?" she whispered, looking at all the blood he had lost. But he couldn't answer; he had grown numb, her words slowing in his hearing, his blood ice in his veins. He felt light and heavy at once. The air was disorienting, thick like water. His mind was clear enough that he could shake his head, and, surprising himself, jump back suddenly, clutching the blood-soaked cloth to his arm, and run with no sense but pain somewhere far from there.

"Bed aoi," he whispered brokenly to her window before he ran.

_Goodbye forever._

There was no escape for him. This new place had no pipes, no windows low enough. He looked blindly at the walls as if searching for some answer to evading the many forms of death that would await him, until his vision blurred and twisted and he only stared and held his head in his hands.

It was very empty as he awaited days, and days again, with no hope. He did nothing, thought nothing of food or water. The light and shadow formed water just to taunt him, but he could not move. No-one came for him. At last he fell asleep.


	6. Revelations

A/N: Arik and Jdehn are from kerjen's 'The Race of Cain' and belong to her, not me :)

* * *

He woke up the next day with a plan formed. Not a plan, really, but actions—he had to do something rather than nothing. He squinted up at the high window then tensed himself, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. He jumped, reaching: his fingers caught at the windowsill. He grinned and punched through the glass, the shards fragmenting green across his skin, blood he quickly wiped away. For a moment, he let himself hang half in and half out the window, in the warmth of the room and the biting coolness of the air outside, the falseness and reality, and thought of May. Then he vaulted downwards, landing a little more heavily than he would have liked, hearing only his heartbeat as he ran.

He could feel someone watching him from a little ways away as he left. Some strange component of the narrowing of his focus, the speed of his running footsteps, restored his knowledge of his limits: he could outrun them, if need be.

But no-one followed him.

He had passed the first test, accomplished one basic means of escape. He knew he needed to do much more to truly be free of Veruul's watch or revenge.

The warm air of the bar enveloped him. Invigorated by the knowledge of escape, he reassured Steve that he was fine and lost himself in work with a furious concentration. The hours slid by while Maiek counted days in his memory. They hung not separate but confused, blurred, with that same gray unrevealed space in the beginning.

It had been warmer when he had arrived, but it felt like it had been a year. He wasn't sure of how time or seasons passed on Earth. He did know that the beginning days—or weeks, or months—were frustratingly blank, unnumbered. What had Veruul done that he did not remember what had passed? Perhaps it was whoever had shown him directions in his mind—a Vulcan? Someone with telepathic abilities—someone who had removed memories…or maybe he had been in such complete exhaustion or unconsciousness that he had been asleep. But he would remember something, if so, wouldn't he?

He had a thought. With a word to Steve, he left. It had grown dark, lamps like surprised faces sudden in the night, illuminating brief glimpses of the city. It seemed cold to him, very cold. Even on Romulus, it wasn't this cold…with a pang of sadness, he realized he had grown used to Vulcan, perhaps more than he had known. His dreams for the last night or two were of the same landscape outside the Forge he had seen before he left, that unattainable sun-scorched land so different from Romulus, different as he was from Vulcans.

He lost those thoughts quickly in footsteps and other thoughts—more plans, more complex than the ones before. He felt he was on the brink of some great puzzling discovery.

Instead of turning the corner to the new place he inhabited, he went straight down the narrow alleyway with the branches like forbidding arms in the total darkness. There was no-one at the entrance, total silence. He pressed an ear against the wall and heard nothing. But there: a guard, in a very low voice, singing something familiar. Maiek grinned, slipped through the back entrance into the shadows inside. The hallways were dark and labyrinthine, not as straightforward as he had thought: his room had connected only to a short path near the front door. The rest were more complicated. The air grew close, in memory, the walls around him indistinct in darkness, blurring sleepily: that was all he had remembered from before. Somehow he managed to edge down the dark stairway into another hallway that led, confusingly, near the back entrance. He thought again of when he had arrived, his thoughts jarred by a sudden grip on his shoulders. Maiek spun and gritted his teeth against the pain of knives or disruptor fire—but nothing came.

The darkness was indistinct, but not entirely darkness: through the gray he made out features he had seen before. He concentrated hard, then realized. This had been one of the only guards he had seen distinctly, who had brought him water that once, though Maiek refused to drink it. He recalled that he had wondered hazily why this man looked so…so…not Romulan. Even in this darkness, it was apparent his hair was a vaguely lighter brown than appeared on Romulans and not reddish at all. He had a thin, sharpish face that bore signs of hardship, his eyes appearing larger in the darkness. His voice—it must have been his voice he had heard—sounded familiar.

There was a sudden absence of pressure: the man had removed his hands from Maiek's shoulders. He made a signal. In the darkness and total silence surrounding them, Maiek followed him up a narrow staircase that opened to the roof, myriad stars breaking into view, painfully distant.

He studied the man again in the better light, questions forming in his mind, then tensed as he saw him grow tense. A light had appeared in a window below. The Romulan—if he was Romulan; his face was too mobile to be a Vulcan's—spoke quickly and quietly.

"We should hide," Maiek said, still puzzling out the man's face, other thing already falling into place—the man seemed guarded as Maiek was: he must be hiding something, not from Maiek, but from Veruul, and thus on Maiek's side. He had not seen him directly follow any of her orders…or cause anyone any harm…in fact, had seen him few times over the past weeks or months.

"No," he said. Even the accent was frustratingly familiar, a little like one Maiek had heard on Romulus once. Maiek thought he had heard something a little similar in another's voice, heavily masked by emotion. "But turn—" He turned his head and body sharply, Maiek following suit, heart pounding.

"If she does not see our faces, we are fine," he continued.

"What—"

The man shook his head. "Speak later. You do not understand yet."

Maiek felt suddenly uncomfortably young and out of place. The feeling lasted only a few seconds.

"Listen. Do everything I tell you. This is important: if you change a single thing, everything can go wrong. It is not what it seems."

Maiek nodded, still thinking even as the man continued speaking. The explanation was long and low-voiced, but changed everything.

Finally, he spoke in reply. "I trust you. But I had better have reason to."

The man grinned, a flash of white in the dark, then abruptly grew serious again. "If anything happens…badly…tell the first person you recognize to contact me."

"But what's your na—"

"Arik."

Maiek leaned forward, trying to distinguish a younger man's face—he hadn't changed much—in Arik's now. He was jolted back into a memory of the red sand and sky of Vulcan…

"I know who you a—"

"Tell Tarek I said hello and none of us needs to make amends." Maiek blinked, alone on the rooftop after the next few moments.

He climbed down the staircase, unable to differentiate different surfaces in the pitch darkness but having already memorized the layout of the building. Near the back entrance, he crouched and sat silently, hearing only his own breathing. There was no motion, nothing, only the light in the room above. He made himself walk back to his room—the wrong room, the one he thought he would never return to. The moonlight filtered in slowly, in bands, across branches and leaves. The room seemed much smaller than he remembered. He lay down, and waited.

.

He felt sharp fingers digging into his side and dragging him upwards, and blinked into the jagged light.

"Yes?" he asked Veruul. The scar across the left side of her face was distracting, smoother than most scars he had seen; he could not look at her thoughtful glass-shard eyes. Even so, in the tensing of her mouth and relaxing of her forehead, he knew she was confused. But not suspecting treachery: she would not guess the reasons he came back of his own accord, and perhaps think one of the guards brought him there.

Despite everything, he feared her, if only from before.

She dragged him outside, into the cold grey street. Leaves were scattered like bright embers at the dark edges of the narrow alleyway. He found himself sharply kneeling.

"The building you inhabited recently was burned down last night," she informed him. "There were no identifiable suspects."

He laughed. She gripped his collar and shoved him to his feet. The morning light flickered silver off her puckered/smooth, strangely-healed skin. Her words were scars across his hearing.

"Do not create that kind of danger again."

"Veruul," he stated.

"What?"

"Your name."

_Ignorant, one connotation of her name. And hated, evil. Various forms of shit. Unable to guess what is happening right before her._

A long-earned satisfaction bubbled through him at her expression that in a moment vanished. Maiek, a few weeks ago, would have feared what she did next.

She unholstered her disruptor and placed it on his hip, fingers glancing icily off his skin as she jerked his shirt over the weapon and checked to see he carried the knife.

"Follow me."

She had no power over him but what she believed still existed, and what she would make him do, what he would try his hardest now to avoid. Her brief satisfaction was palpable at his faltering, the blood that vanished from his face, his hands that shook as he walked.

The streets blurred before him, the lights sickeningly punched across his vision. He knew the way like the underside of his heart, the sign he had glimpsed once.

"You go into here.

You know what comes next."

His arms, his shoulders were completely rigid as if they could become weapons themselves against her.

"Don't do this to me," he spat, breath coming with difficulty, his face a pale mask. "I would die."

_I would have died._

She twitched and stepped backward slightly. The leaves reflected in her eyes…so different than May's…were a fire, eating away at everything. Taken aback, perhaps, at knowing the reasons behind the fire. That he would have been in it, her goals coming to nothing. The others surviving.

_There are still ways_, he would have thought, if Arik had not changed things the night before, if the world had not been twisted into a different shape he had seen all along. _I do not need to do what she asks_, he would have thought. _I will not._ His mind one last farewell to the autumn leaves and the moon in another's eyes. But no…Veruul did not know the half of it. It was not what he thought now.

There was a faint fear that he would not succeed, a fear that pressed his heart to his ribs and threatened to crush air from his lungs. His hands shook.

"No," she said to him, alien as an amputated limb. "You were born from them. You acted the same, in your early years. You can kill."

She did not tell him that his memories would be gone afterwards, seasons and years an edgeless blur of gray. That comfort had vanished with his rebellion, the anger that had consumed her at the possibility that he might have died.

"I cannot," he whispered roughly. His voice broke abruptly. Oddly, he could not let her see the brightness in his eyes, whether from tears or adrenaline.

_Analek's hand holding out a knife. Maiek, shaking, staring at his older brother, hands tight fists._

_"You cannot do it."_

_You should not, Maiek knew Analek was thinking._

_"No one should kill," they both said. Maiek looked up at Analek and had a moment of shock as he saw himself._

Somehow he passed through the building. It was one of those ones with unspeakably thick security, fingerprints easily visible on every metal surface, scans of one sort or another at every corner. His eyes passed over the few areas with writing in Vulcan. There was a single phrase in Romulan, shorter and less well-worded—but still, nothing about anger. Or death. This was an opposite place.

How ignorant, he would have been, had he gone and done this before. He would have found some way to escape. Or some way to die. He would have been spotted in an instant and taken to Vulcan or put to death. He would not have understood anything.

Mercifully, the people wore nothing close to suits or anything Maiek would struggle with. Veruul, around the time when waking him, had given him other clothing that was less noticeable. He had wondered briefly where she had gotten it…no, his thoughts could not stray. He had to understand every second of what happened, what was said.

He found his way to an open atrium, something akin to a conference room but larger. A warm voice echoed throughout, the speaker quieter than most whose voices had been heard here. It caught around Maiek's recognition and stabbed tears into his eyes. He forced himself into hiding behind the dark shadow of someone hiding behind him, turning his head forcefully away from meeting his father's eyes. Even at this point, he could not be seen.

He made his way carefully forward and to the side, slipping from behind someone to behind someone else every few seconds, in the pauses between speaking—Tarek still struggled with Standard somewhat. Maiek's ears caught with interest something about the treaty his parents—and others—brought before the Federation and would eventually bring before the Empires. A woman looked back and squinted at him briefly, as if she had seen him somewhere. Maiek ducked again and sidestepped his way away, backtracking somewhat.

At last he came to the spot he should be, behind others but not completely. His eyes wandered to the people sitting in the upward portion of the atrium and he nearly jumped, recognizing Arik. He let his consciousness expand, his hearing drift to others' conversations and the more important words being spoken, at once, lighting with a concentration on certain words with impatience. He would wait. His eyes snapped open as the world inverted. There was a sudden snarl and a whirlwind of dark clothing—a fist connected with his forehead, making his eyelids flicker closed automatically—he sprinted to a far corner, springing out of Veruul's chokehold. She must have realized something.

"You—!" she cried, voice nearly incomprehensible.

"_No_," he said forcefully. He could not have done anything she had asked.

His vision had distorted; colors ran where they shouldn't be. Veruul's location was dangerously difficult to determine—somewhere where his sight bruised and became indistinct. But then he knew where she was and grabbed her arm, sharply throwing himself out the door with his weight stopping her for a moment. Her arm struggled to break free; her other hand dug into his back, fingernails stabbing into his shoulder blade. He gasped but kept a hold on her. He could only sense confusion all around—there was no sound but voices—he struggled to breathe; her hand had clawed around his throat. The world around him had dark spots by now…lack of air…he choked free and applied as much pressure as he could until there was a sharp snap and Veruul went limp, her muscles still tense. Besides the swarm of people somewhere in the periphery of his vision, he knew that Arik was beside him. He turned, about to say something—

—and looked up into different eyes than Arik's. It had been years; his father's face had changed little, though his hair was slightly longer than he remembered, the emotion in his eyes more balanced. There was a moment of panic and confusion as Tarek saw the right features, and—

"Maiek." It was a sure statement, not a question.

_Saavik sounds like him_, Maiek thought, surprised.

The world still swam around him. He closed his eyes for a long moment; behind his eyelids, it was sickeningly bruise-dark. Tarek bent and checked the assassin's vital signs.

"She is not dead," he said coldly, looking down at her and then away. Maiek thought of different assassins who had had different motivations, years before.

His vision had sharpened a little, everything coming back into focus. Veruul looked smaller than Maiek remembered, when she was not moving or threatening or plotting. Her head bent oddly, the scar side of her face turned up, hair darker than blood across her face. Sickened, he turned her face to the other side, feeling very young. He straightened and stiffly made a gesture of vague respect to the fallen woman. She was no longer dangerous, for the time being, at least, but it was…sad, in a way. Maiek thought that perhaps, had he been raised differently, had different circumstances arrived, had he been that child born on another planet, he may have been in the same situation.

"Middle-aged, Romulan, female, lateral burn scar…," he heard before shutting the words out of his hearing. He thought suddenly he didn't want to know what her name was.

"Come back," he told Tarek, whose back was still turned; he sorted through medical supplies, finding a hypo. His father turned at his voice. Maiek blinked, feeling arms around him: his mother. He blinked shock-given tears away.

His father nodded. "It will be less than a year to convince the Federation enough for them to handle it without us from there."

He looked again, hard, at Maiek as if recognizing him again for the first time, frowning slightly, thoughts written across his face. "Maiek…"

He did not get to continue, though the less-than-a-moment hung strangely between them: Maiek saw himself, younger, confused and tormented by similar situations…that he had changed…

Maiek suddenly looked down at Veruul's body as if realizing where he was and what significance his actions might have, taken in the wrong context. He broke free from Rhian's embrace, finding Arik's face and giving him a significant look of _explain everything to everyone, please_ before running to the spaceport with a freedom he had not known for months.

In the blur of air and people that followed, something halted him. Arik had caught up to him. His face receded into a different blur; Maiek blinked—the world spun slightly. Arik steadied him, and when that failed to do anything, picked him up.

"It's good I came to Earth. I'm not sure why, but it does mean there's transport for you back to Vulcan. With a hell of a lot less questions than you would encounter on a starship." Arik grinned, though that too blurred in Maiek's sight.

"Here you go," he said, depositing Maiek onto the ground for a moment. "Wait a second."

Maiek could only see shadows and color that moved strangely. There was a ship…very small, reminiscent of the one that had taken him to Vulcan…and a woman who embraced Arik briefly before mocking him slightly. Jdehn, he remembered. One of the others from Hellguard Saavik had somewhat uneasily agreed to meet along with Maiek's parents. She was dark-haired, focused, and illogical—and fiercely independent.

"Fought, did you?" she teased him, hand blurring to Arik's hand or face—Maiek couldn't tell.

"Not really. This one did."

"Ha. I remember him." Her tone was less condescending than it had been various other times, however; Maiek had the odd feeling she sometimes meant the opposite of what she said. "Wasn't he—"—she lowered her hand to about waist level—"—about this tall when we saw him?"

"On Romulus, yes, but he wouldn't remember that."

"Not—the one who would be gone first," she said, meaning Arik. _He's the youngest, he's the next to go if this place runs out of food_, she had referred to Arik once. Maiek could tell, in a way, that it still stung slightly.

"Well, I'll be back shortly." Their forms merged briefly, and Arik helped Maiek into the ship.

"Whoops," Jdehn said. "I forgot you grew so fast. It was a while ago…How old are you now?"

Maiek blinked again. It was difficult to speak. Her face swam before him. "Fif…t…een…"

Her mouth tightened as she saw the bruise forming on his head. "I would advise not talking for a while. Sorry about that."

He let his vision go for a while, colors becoming independent or merged in turn. He focused again when something again came into the foreground, however. Dark reddish hair—someone talking to Jdehn—

He sat up. "Wait!"

May turned to look at him, and he was suddenly gifted with speech and a rush of consciousness. She smiled.

"Good work, there," she told him. Her voice had grown more evident than he had realized before.

"I wasn't sure if Veruul would think that we…"

"She suspected you were up to something. She thought you left, and so I dealt with the building while you were gone. It was a difficult role to play."

"How do you know Jdehn?" Arik asked, wondering hazily.

May laughed, came closer. He reached out a hand to hers, one she took, blushing slightly. There was something odd about it…

"I couldn't tell you before we had 'Veruul'—nice name for her, by the way; it was difficult not to laugh when I heard it and reveal myself—dealt with. It was difficult, believe me. Did you wonder at all why I wasn't angry you had lied to me? About being Romulan?"

"You did seem angry."

"I had to. But I wasn't."

He looked at her long and hard. Her hair had escaped over her shoulders, strands falling in unruly waves very long. Her autumn eyes, her face…not human, he had thought when he had first saw her. Unlike any human he had ever seen.

"I knew your name already. My m—Evine sent me to Earth when I was very young. I was briefed by Spock and Saavik, of all people, about how I would go about protecting your parents and the others who would help with this treaty."

"You did pronounce it much better than the rest," he said, waiting.

She smiled hesitantly. "I didn't expect to fall in love with you. Nobody expects…I was supposed to make sure nobody killed you. Veruul especially. There was a group of 'assassins' established a short while before Tarek and Rhian came to Earth, the 'assassins', Arik among them, trying to draw other, real, assassins out of hiding and make them no longer a threat. It went out of hand. The 'assassins' had nearly found a way to make Veruul…no longer a threat…until you arrived and she found you."

"Bloody mess that was," Jdehn commented in the midst of preparing for departure. "I didn't see Arik for…really, two years before this all started…"

Maiek nodded. He had guessed what May was leading up to. "Evine…" he began.

"…was my mother," May told him softly. "My full name is Aimne. I have no house name, not belonging to Romulus, really."

Maiek realized this was her fourth name, and stared. No Romulan told their fourth name lightly, even when they were raised on Earth.

"So you bleed green like me."

"Yes."

"How did you…" He reached up in the general direction of her ears.

"A very complex bit of machinery I don't understand myself completely. It's a little like illusion, in simplest terms. I've had it for a few years now, since the beginning possibility of the Federation's war with Romulus. I'll have it surgically removed from my spine when…if…I come to Vulcan." She had stopped speaking, though her eyes held his, saying something on their own.

_If you want me to come to Vulcan. _

"How soon?" he asked, feeling suddenly her hand around his as a connection, alive, hopeful.

She laughed and bent to kiss him. His vision was still strange, slightly unfocused…but he could see how her face was same and different now that he knew she was Romulan. But she was May in essence, not human, not Romulan, not anything defined other than that. Herself.

"You'll see me. A year later, at most. I may be needed here if any more problems arise."

He let his eyes close as she withdrew, her presence still lingering like sunlight. He was asleep, perhaps healing, as they left Earth for Vulcan, a bond stretching in his mind between the two places, what had happened and what would come to pass.


	7. Full Circle

**2308**

**Four Earth months after Maiek's disappearance**

**ShiKahr, Vulcan**

Fortunately, Jdehn, while capable of flying a ship, was also capable of minor first aid, enough so that Maiek could walk when they arrived at Vulcan. She said little, but he remembered when they had met. Not the first time, when some of the Hellguard survivors beyond those he knew had come to Romulus and informed Tarek and Rhian and the rest of their plans of action to avoid or combat the assassinations. But years later, when Maiek and Rhys were still adjusting to the strangeness that was Vulcan, being looked after, no danger, and no parents present.

Saavik had suddenly left the room when informed that Jdehn and Arik would be seeing them, then returned moments later. Maiek had not needed to guess what was going on in her mind—it was a complexity beyond what Tarek sometimes dealt with. At least it wasn't the others, he had wanted to tell her. But he was still in that uncomfortable time of silence, preferring to learn what little Vulcan he could rather than see her react the way she did to '_Sa'Av Ik_'.

It was subtle, but Jdehn and Arik were now…different than they had been, more so than between the first meeting and the second. Maiek couldn't exactly put a finger on it. He knew that he, too, had changed.

He sat for a moment after they landed, mistrusting his body's energy, then walked, a little slowly, without Jdehn's assistance. There was a small amount of déjà vu at arriving somewhere much the same way he had arrived there before…the sunrise reddened the Vulcan sky further, set it alight, the same color the sandstorm had been.

He pushed open the door, muscles aching with his arm movements. There was a crack there he didn't remember, which must be undergoing some sort of repair.

How to describe the relief at no longer being in a cage? No longer mistrusting? His attitudes towards Vulcan seemed ridiculous in comparison…before entering, his eyes caught a flash of the color of the sky, again, that formed, in his mind, into May. No, he wasn't entirely happy; he waited.

Something pushed against his legs. Maiek looked down in surprise: a curly-haired boy stared upwards accusingly, though having trapped his brother's limbs tightly. The four-year-old had grown significantly, a few inches over four months.

"You went away for a long time," Rhys observed with a stubborn frown. His words contained more Vulcan than Maiek remembered. "I ran—they tried to stop me—but I couldn't find you."

"You wouldn't have wanted to come with me. It wasn't the best of times. Remember, on Romulus, when we had to go inside…" _…after Analek died_, he thought.

Rhys shook his head, puzzled. Of course he didn't remember; he had been only one. "Well, good. It was a little like that." _Like that could have been._

And so it was that Saavik walked in, a few minutes later, to see the older boy, looking wearied and confused and battered, and Rhys deep in serious conversation about how to escape from high windows and what their parents had said and what Romulan curse words Rhys should _not_ use.

She didn't announce herself, only saw a look that was…different…in Maiek's eye. Less wary, but in other ways more separate, different than he had been two years ago. What she was unprepared for was the sudden moment of understanding as their eyes met, the same look that she had seen when she realized Tarek was alive.

Everything had come full circle, in a way. But different: no longer what was necessary for survival.

**2313**

**Sometime after the return of the _Polaris_, the ship T'Sei is on**

**Vulcan**

She had not had to enter the house, after all. She wasn't sure what she would say to Sa'Av Ik —May had guessed the half-Vulcan was more of a mother to Maiek than perhaps he acknowledged; Tarek and Rhian were rarely at home—and while she felt she could handle the discussion, she felt a certain degree of uncertainty.

She had not had to enter, because outside, in the same spot he had been when this all started—though May did not know that—a lone figure stood against the stars and the night. He likely heard as she approached, but let her see him first. He had grown, lengthened, though there were still hints of that fine-boned awkwardness in his limbs that she had grown used to in his adolescence. The years had narrowed and intensified his face. His eyes held the same unnamable expression she had seen when he thought she was asleep.

And…"Something is troubling you," Aimne observed. Nothing about the years that had passed, or the reasons she was on Vulcan. None mattered.

His voice, deeper, nearly calm—meaning not at all—

"My cousin is thinking about getting married." He looked at her fully then, and the years hit her like weights—or rather, the lack thereof, the same fire that burned within him, the sadness and exultation of the child he had been in comparison stripping away the past. In a flash, the corner of his mouth lifted and then he grinned.

No, there was nothing Vulcan about him at all!

"Well?" he asked, though she still looked at him in silence. In her eyes, he was still fifteen; she saw past everything that had happened.

Nearly shaking with the energy of things that needed no speaking, she abruptly brought a hand up to the side of his face. He leaned into her touch, perhaps remembering, remembering powerfully.

There was a new beginning, in the silence of the moonless night around them, his closed eyes against hers, the cautious meeting of their lips. He was still smiling.

There needed be no answer.


End file.
